Does anyone else have a moment when nostalgia lets you down? That’s rhetorical, because of course you do. Now, I’ve reviewed shows like “All That” and “Hey Arnold” and loved every second of going back and looking at it. “Street Sharks” less so, but I get why little Dave liked it. Then I get to “Step by Step.” I remember liking this show. My sister and I would come home from school, or whenever it was on, and watch this show. We would enjoy the goofy actions of JT and Cody and the wackiness caused by all these different kids living under the same roof. Now, it just doesn’t do it for me. Granted, I’m older and a little more jaded, but I think if it had some merit I could see it. It was basically standard sitcom fair, but somehow more so? There are so many clichés in this show, and it just killed the careers of basically everyone on it except maybe the two old television stars that it was created to carry.
Let’s get my first criticism out of the way: how does this idea get picked up? I guess they were desperate to capitalize on the fame of Patrick Duffy who just got done with “Dallas” and Suzanne Somers who just finished “Three’s Company” over a decade earlier. If she left that show to get better roles, that clearly did not work. Aside from creating a vehicle bomb the likes of which al-Qaeda could not even fathom, this show was just the “Brady Bunch”. They didn’t even mess with the number of kids. It was two people bringing there 3 to the house. They switched some genders, but the girl that came from the boy family was sporty, and the boy from the girl side was very feminine. They just remade the “Brady Bunch” 20 years later and added a stoner cousin. Cody is better than Oliver, but still, it seems ill advised. I love Jason Marsden and who doesn’t love Bronson Pinchot? The former’s addition to the cast took him off “Boy Meets World” (stupid idea) and the latter was another old sitcom dust off. Makes sense for this show, and made the show better, but still more predictable and worse at the same time.
Wow, that was a long paragraph. I never thought some crappy sitcom would work me up so much. Anyway, the reason I thought to do this show is because I enjoy looking up actors I haven’t seen in a long time to see what they ended up doing. Sadly, most of them didn’t do anything else. 3 of the 6 don’t even have IMDB.com pictures, so that’s a hint. Let’s go over the ones that do and just admit the others did no more acting.
Christopher Castile is a fluke. His picture is from his biggest success in the “Beethoven” movies. So he’s pretty much been a non-factor since either of us had hit puberty. He was an attempt to be white Urkel.
Staci Keanan was a big deal on this show and “My Two Dad’s” and is now the queen of kind of feministy movies.
The only kind of “success’ story is Christine Lakin, if anything because she’s very attractive. She made one of the worst movies ever when she’s supposed to be uglier than Paris Hilton, and it didn’t work because that’s not true. She’s done other stuff and voices a lady on “Family Guy.” Not bad.
The only other person with a picture that’s not previously really famous is the cousin. Sasha Mitchell is now a jacked up Tae Kwon Do guy. He mainly plays some guy on television shows.
So, outside of the fascination with old character actors and how they just disappear into normal lives like us, this review is less about the show and more about them. I’ve also mainly ranted about step kid television shows. Oh well. Plot lines aren’t really important, except maybe the stance on step cousin relations. Cody liked Dana, and they were now kind of relatives. Creepy. Oh well, here’s a picture of the youngest child in the family now, after just not showing up on screen for the last 2 seasons of the show.
I'm pretty sure he's replacing Depp in the Pirates movies that are going to be straight to DVD.
Credits go to: Wikipedia.org, IMDB.com, tvguide.com, thefw.com